Tuesday, April 06, 2010

Since my laptop, an HP Pavilion DV6000, is on the verge of dying, I decided to buy a replacement. A Macbook was what I looked at first but it is too expensive for me. Besides, I work mostly on Windows and Linux. The next choice was a Thinkpad T400. Mixed reviews of the model sold in India and the expensive price tag even without the Windows tax left me searching for alternatives. Then I received a nice deal from Dell for the new Inspiron model 1464 and I bought it. A fast machine at a much lower price.

Last week I received my new laptop and here are my initial impressions. Note that this is by no means a proper review. The focus is on things that are either essentials or major annoyances on my previous laptop.

The model is a 14" laptop powered by a Core i5 430M with 3G of RAM and a 320GB SATA HDD running at 7200 RPM. The build is decent for a low-end laptop. The design is similar to the newer Vostro models and also borrws a few things from the Studio line.

The keyboard is decent with fullsize keys and with a rounded bevel on the keycaps. The travel is just a bit on the shorter side. The tactile feedback is pretty decent. I think it uses one of those "scissor" switches. I typed on it for a while and could detect no flex unlike my previous laptop where there was a lot of flex at the center. While the keyboard is good, the layout of the keys is where Dell screwed up badly. Firstly, the right shift key is smaller and not aligned with the enter key. To hit the right shift key with my right pinky I'll have to curl my other fingers and this can be painful when done frequently. The bigger screwup is the arrangement of the function keys. The function keys are swapped with the hardware control keys!!! and require an Fn keypress. This is simply ridiculous. The function keys are also off as there is an additional key to toggle the touchpad. Sigh.

The touchpad is a nice one with a large surface area and has a matte texture that adds a nice feel. The touchpad buttons are firm and provide a good feedback when pressed. The right edge of the touchpad can be used as a scroll area as well.

The display is 14" across with a native resolution of 1366x768 which is pretty basic considering other laptops offer much higher resolutions (eg: the similarly priced Travelmate gives you 1280x800 for a 12" display). The display is bright with upto 15 levels of brightness adjustments which is quite good. The display is housed on a bevelled screen with firm hinges that is bridged with the main body and can tilt upto 120-135 degrees easily. The screen does not wobble when typing fast.

Performance seems to be quite good but then every laptop that I've touched since my HP Pavilion seems to run faster :). The machine comes bundled with 64bit Windows 7 Home Premium. I managed to get rid of 800MB of stuff from "Program Files". Never understood why these programs are installed in the first place.

Windows 7 - the taskbar is an improvement. However Aero as an interface theme simply sucks. Nimbus, Nodoka, Clearlooks are all so much better. The window manager animations stutter sometimes and it is not a pretty sight. I guess the cheap GMA 4500 HD video card is the culprit. But then I won't be needing fancy animations so I'll turn those things off. Good to see the disk management tool being able to resize the partition(s) as otherwise it would have taken much longer to do it with gparted.

Compiling software is a good test for measuring overall performance. A full debug build of wxWidgets-trunk (make -j4) using GCC was completed in 11 minutes (approx) with all the cores 100% most of the time and running on battery. This is pretty good as my quad-core desktop gets the same thing done in 7 minutes (approx). This will perhaps be the most resource intensive thing I'll be doing on this machine so I'm happy with the performance that I got.

The laptop comes with a 6-cell battery which lasted for roughly 2.5 hours under a typical workload with wireless on most of the time and normal screen brightness. In comparison, the HP Pavilion's 6-cell battery gave at most 35 minutes. I had replace it with a 10-cell one last last year and I get about 2-2.5 hours. Something is definitely wrong with that machine. My experience with HP's support was quite bad.

There is one area of concern: the fan seems to be on all the time even when the machine is idle. Need to contact the support people and get this sorted out. I hope that the experience won't be as bad as it was the last time I called the customer support.